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OPINION

Protests of immigrant children shameful

Wisconsin
Published 2:37 p.m. CT July 30, 2014

Kim, left, and Tom Ratcliffe hold flags while praying outside of the Wolverine Center in Vassar, Mich., Monday July 14, 2014. The are opposed to the plan to house detained immigrant children from Central America, at the facility.
(Photo11:
AP
)

Immigration policy is complex. The appropriate response when children are in distress, however, is not. Whatever their origins, such children deserve nothing less than our compassion, care and generosity.

Regrettably, too many people and so-called leaders – including some in Michigan – are sending precisely the opposite message.

On Monday, about 50 demonstrators – two of them armed with semi-automatic rifles in what can only be described as an obscene exhibit of xenophobia – marched to protest plans to house 120 children at the Wolverine Pioneer Work and Learn Center in the small community of Vassar.

The protesters, reprising a slightly larger demonstration a week prior, carried signs with messages such as “Go Home. We’re Full” and “No gang members. No terrorists.”

The kids, of course, are among the 87,000 unaccompanied minors who have streamed through the U.S.-Mexico border over the past year, many if not most, seeking refuge from unimaginable violence and crime, and in the process reigniting the U.S. culture war over immigration.

Republicans eager to discredit President Barack Obama and immigration policies have seized on the phenomenon as an example of that failure, although it’s not at all clear, as has been alleged, that the president’s executive decision to defer action on childhood arrivals is at the root of the influx.

Nor is it the president’s alleged (and unfounded) leniency toward unauthorized immigrants. U.S. law has long given additional protection to minors who arrive alone in the United States. Obama is actually interested in stripping away some of those protections, and his request to Congress for $3.7 billion in funding to deal with crisis is to hasten their processing and eventual return.

In other words, the president is trying to follow the law –ironic given his critics’ proclivity for accusing Obama of ignoring the law. Truth is often the first casualty of our poisoned politics. Which brings us back to Michigan. Were they to come to Michigan, the children and teenagers would be here but temporarily and would present no threat to the community. They would receive basic medical care, shelter, education and, we would hope, a taste of common decency that we’d like to think better reflect what this nation and state is really about, before moving on to be processed.

And that might be what really hurts about the protests in Vassar, the U.S. border and in other cities where they have occurred. In very real ways, such exhibits of hate, fear and inhumanity increasingly define us as a people, particularly when some of our political leaders give their tacit or expressed approval of the messages they send.

We’d like to think that in the wake of this week’s protests, elected leaders of both parties would step up to refute the crazies and let the world know that regardless of their politics, the focus in this moment is the welfare of those kids. That’s where it should be for all of us.